I’m not a gear hound. My love of trad climbing has something to do with gear–the placing of it, the puzzling it out–but I don’t go nuts for the newest toy. I have a very strict policy that nothing can be added to the rack without something of similar weight being subtracted, and my rack is too perfect to tinker with.

I’ve said before that running only requires a pair of shoes and a sports bra–and I’ll live without the sports bra–but it has its trinkets. For my last and longest training run, I borrowed Steve’s GPS watch. My intention was to run by time, not by mileage, to focus on staying slow and steady and walking the hills and taking appropriate nutrition breaks, but to stay on my feet for a solid 8 hours, which is still only 80% of what I’m anticipating on race day.

And yet, I’m exceedingly anal retentive. No matter how much I wasn’t focusing on the mileage, I was going to need to know what the mileage was. That was where the GPS came in. I was able to meander around the reservoir, taking whatever trail sparked my fancy, and avoiding hills as much as possible (since they were only excuses to walk) and yet to know, at the end, how far I’d gone. Because up to that point I’d only run 28 miles and 50 is a heck of a lot more than 28.

The GPS is a blast. It’s big and bulky and my wrist, already a little sore from wearing my running watch so much lately, felt bruised after a few hours. But it’s fun. It gives you distance and elevation gain and current pace and average pace and even heart rate if you hook it up (which I didn’t).

I kept it on the average pace display and tried to peg it at 12 minute miles. Now, a 12 minute mile is slow. Very slow. A fast walker on flat ground can do 15 minute miles. But for an average, considering hills and pit stops, it was my target pace, and I figured out that if I could stick to 12 minute miles, I could do 40 miles during my 8 hour run. It’s not a good idea to do math in your head while running, as it’s rarely accurate, but in this case I was right.

I stuck to it too. Sometimes I’d get briefly ahead, and frequently I’d get despairingly behind, but as I got close to 8 hours the target of 40 miles seemed so doable that I made a deal with myself that I was running 8 hours or 40 miles, whichever came first. Which is why I came to a dead stop at 7:56.

Eventually I realized no one was going to rescue me and limped the remaining two tenths of a mile back to my car, but I was damned if I was going to run another step. Thank you GPS for saving me from those last 4 minutes.

On Sunday Steve and I went and visited Firewall and he led one of the new bolted routes and I gratefully took a toprope on it. We used the static rope he bought me for Christmas–the newest piece of gear I own. It was cool and windy and I was glad to be out and not running. I’m ready for my race now, and I think the GPS is coming with me.